The trip to bountiful
By Geoffrey Philp
The Fullness of Everything, by Patricia Powell
(Peepal Tree Press, ISBN 978-1845231132, 240 pp)Simple acts. They add up. They add up until they become a life. A life filled with complications, setbacks, betrayals, and sometimes a little happiness. And from birth, this one life joins a web of family, friends, and acquaintances which extends to those who have yet to come and those who have joined eternity. “The unity is submarine,” as Kamau Brathwaite said in another context, the closest description I can apply to Patricia Powell’s fourth novel, The Fullness of Everything, a meditation on the intimate connections among relationships of blood and compassion, rendered in exquisite prose.
There are so many things I could say about The Fullness of Everything. I could say that the novel is about a history professor, Winston Rowe, who upon receiving news of his father’s imminent death, returns to Jamaica after a twenty-five-year absence only to discover that his father is still alive and has sired an “outside” child. And that the child, Rosa, possesses psychic abilities that allow her to sense the thoughts and feelings of those around her — including her dead father:
The plane had barely left the ground, had barely settled itself more firmly in the sky and levelled off, her ears had only just stopped popping when their father appeared wearing the same light blue bush-jacket with red embroidery on the pockets that he used to wear on Sundays for the afternoon meal.
I could also say that the novel’s overlapping narratives seamlessly exploit the differing points of view of Winston and his brother, Septimus, who has never recovered from the death of Althea, his twin sister, and is dealing with his wife’s infidelity:
In the hotel at Treasure Beach they make love, as this is the only language he knows, but when they are done, the chasm between them is even wider than before and he doesn’t know what to do with his wife, with his marriage, with his own damn self, with the disgust away in his chest.
But I would be telling only half of the story. Or, rather, it would be a pedestrian reading of the novel.
The Fullness of Everything is one of those rare novels that can be read for a well-told story, expertly plotted and developed, and which will leave you feeling good, not just because of the seemingly effortless resolution of the essential conflicts, but also for Powell’s masterful strokes of characterisation that lull the reader into identifying with the main characters, or at the very least into thinking that she knows people like the ones in the novel. Add to this gorgeous prose:
In the middle of the day when the sun is at its zenith, the light at its whitest, when there is no breeze at all stirring the world and all God’s creatures have come to a complete full stop — the dog is fast asleep under the mango tree, its mouth bubbling with foam; the cat is curled up underneath the bed licking herself slowly and yawning; the birds have taken refuge down by the river; the rooster is too stunned to crow; the cows have fallen to their knees in the fields; the flies don’t even bother to move out of the way of the swatter; the mosquitoes land on your arm and forget to sip — this when they come to the willow trees at the bottom of the garden, his mother periodically dozing off and then picking up the conversation again, mid-sentence.
If it seems I am overly enthusiastic (which no self-respecting critic should be), I am. Patricia Powell has written — yes, I’ll say it — a beautiful novel in every sense of the word. Against the background of her previous novels — Me Dying Trial (1993), The Pagoda (1998), and A Small Gathering of Bones (2003) — The Fullness of Everything continues the theme of healing to its logical conclusion. It’s an apt gift for a reader who has poured passion, tears, and laughter into this life, for she will be rewarded with well-crafted sentences and sensuous images in that other life of the imagination. Every word is measured, every emotion is earned without a hint of sentimentality — yet a sense of bounty remains. Sometimes I feel as if Powell is trying to tell the whole human story in these 240 pages, “pressed down, shaken together, and running over.” And sometimes, I believe. I believe.
•••
The Caribbean Review of Books, July 2010
Geoffrey Philp is a Jamaican writer based in Miami. His next collection of poems, Dub Wise, will be published by Peepal Tree Press in September 2010.
Coming home with Jamaican author Patricia Powell
Published: Saturday | September 12, 2009
Powell
It is almost impossible to believe that as a child, Jamaica-born Patricia Powell did not have a deep yearning to become a writer. But she says she did not. When she moved from Jamaica with her family to live in the United States in 1982, she was just 16 years old and very much in survival mode. "Becoming a writer was the last thing on my mind," she said.
Today Powell is an award-winning author. Her most recent work is The Fullness of Everything and her other novels are Me Dying Trial (which was her first novel), The Pagoda and A Small Gathering of Bones.
Powell was born in Spanish Town and grew up in Manchester. When she moved to Boston, Massachusetts, in the USA, she finished high school then went on to WellesleyCollege.
From 1984 to 1988 she majored in creative writing and English literature then went on toBrown University in 1989. There she did graduate studies in creative writing until 1991.
"Even after I finished a novel/manuscript for my senior thesis and another one at graduate school, it still didn't occur to me that I was a writer," she said.
Very Fortunate
"Derek Walcott was a writer, V.S. Naipaul was a writer, Louise Bennett was a writer. These were all authors that I read as a young girl at school. It was impossible to imagine myself among them, so I just didn't," she continued. "Becoming a university professor was a very natural step after graduate school. I have to admit I have been very fortunate. Time and again I've felt led in my life as if there were an invisible cord pulling me to the next best thing, to the next best set of circumstances. I'm often humbled by this."
Powell has been teaching in the United States since 1991. At first she found the experience rather challenging. She was young, just 24 years old, and inexperienced. But today she says she really enjoys teaching.
"I love getting students excited about language, about ideas, about the possibilities inside their stories; I love watching them access knowledge they didn't know they know, I love watching them explore the dark heart of their character's humanity, I love watching them get to know themselves," she said.
The Fullness of Everything took at least eight years to write and it dragged me through every awful emotion imaginable. For several months I had to put it aside, it was just too intense," said Powell.
"But it's such a beautiful thing to have some feedback after that very long and solitary and arduous journey. It's a beautiful thing to look up from the work once it's completed and know that there are readers who have been waiting, that there are readers who value what you do, who are curious about the next thing. In that moment you recognise that you are not alone, that your work is important, that your work is part of an ongoing conversation about how we live and love in the world and walk through fear and learn courage and bring gifts of understanding to each other."
Favourite Country
Patricia has travelled widely - mostly to Western Europe, but she has also visited Lebanon in the Middle East.
"My favourite country is Spain. So much of rural Spain reminds me of rural Jamaica," she said. "I love the tiny bars where the men hang around the counters and talk and drink and grow boisterous and litter the floor with peanut shells. I'm often reminded of the little shop my family owned in Manchester and where the men behaved in just this fashion. In those bars in Spain, when they serve tapas, I'm always excited that no part of the pig or cow is wasted. Even the ears are tasty."
Powell says many writers have influenced her.
"It's impossible to name them or even to explain how they've influenced me, except to say that reading is an essential part of my writing. It's as if I'm in constant conversation with other writers. There is so much to learn about style, about language, but also about place and ideas."
As a child growing up in Jamaica, there were some early influences on her life. She was an avid listener of Dulcemina, a once popular radio play. She also loved Miss Lou and Mass Ran.
She added, "We had a church and I often dreamed of being a minister so I could deliver those long-winded sermons and prayers to rapt attention. We also had a shop, which was the centre of our little district, and whenever that rum flowed, there were stories galore.
Do you draw much from your own life experiences for your books? Can you mention any such experiences?
"The books are fictionalised experiences and again they are not," she said. The Pagodais about Chinese immigration to Jamaica, but I used my experiences as a Jamaican immigrant to the US to help me write it. By researching and learning about the history of the Chinese and the ordeals they suffered on those boats during the crossing and again on the plantations, I was able to come to some understanding of my own situation as an immigrant."
Do you visit Jamaica often? What are your thoughts on the many changes that have taken place there since you left in 1982?
"Like the character Winston in the The Fullness of Everything, for many years I did not come home. There were many things that made me uneasy, especially our treatment of gay people. I wrote about some of those issues in my second novel, A Small Gathering of Bones."
In the last year, however, she has spent more time in Jamaica than ever before.
"I've fallen in love with Jamaica all over again, everything, the sun, the heat, the sky, the mosquitoes, the mountains, the food, the bad roads, our laughter, our stories, people's kindness, their infinite goodness," she continued.
"I've decided that Jamaica is home after all, that she produced me, and in producing me she also gave me a voice to adore her wild beauty and also to speak out against injustice."
>via: http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20090912/life/life2.html